This course is a required course for all first year engineering students and occurs only in the second semester (basically replacing chemistry in your time table).
Basically what you learn in Materials is the physical properties of substances rather than the chemical properties, as you would in chemistry. Units include stress/strain, electrical conductivity, and thermal expansion; just to name a few. More boring units include the different type of carbon-steel microstructures (i.e. Martensite, Banite, Pearlite. etc), but luckily these units are quite short.
Walking into this course I completely hated the idea of it since it sounded like another chemistry class. The professor I had was Gian-Luigi Botton, and he really sucked. The problem is that he's "too" good at Materials Engineering (since he's the head of it at McMaster) to be teaching a first year course. He goes way too fast since all this stuff seems obvious to him.
Therefore, I switched to Hatem Zurob's class, since he's the one who is head of the course. He's a great professor and goes slow to allow you to take down notes and absorb the content. I recommend going to his lectures instead since he also tends to give out "hints" as to what will be on the tests and the final exam.
The course consists of two tests, worth 18.5% each, six assignments on the computer worth 3% each, a "mock" assignment, which is basically a free 2% and the final exam worth 45%.
The tests are pretty straight forwards, and you can bring in a double-sided cheat sheet of whatever you want for each and the final exam. The only complaint I have about the tests is that they had very few questions. This meant that if you get one multiple choice question wrong; it could take up to 5% off of your test mark.
The assignments were alright since you get 3 chances on each one (with different questions of course).
Overall, I would say this is one of those courses where you don't see the point of it until it's completely done; to show you what you'd be doing if you selected Materials Engineering as your stream in second year. I found it okay since you do learn a few interesting things here and there. I'm glad that I never have to do anything like it again though
Recommendations I can give are, take notes! I really regretted not having done this at the end because it made studying for the final exam a lot harder.
On a side note: DO NOT buy the text book for this class. The electronic version is available for free on DC++. It's actually better than the real thing because you can just search for key words while doing assignments.
